kottke.org posts about Alex Cornell

A dronie is a video selfie taken with a drone. I featured Amit Gupta’s beautiful dronie yesterday:

Other people have since taken dronies of their own and the idea seems like it’s on the cusp of becoming a thing. Here’s one taken by Joshua Works of him and his family on the shore of a lake in Nevada:

The Works clan sold most of their worldly possessions in 2011 and has been travelling the US in an Airstream ever since, logging more than 75,000 miles so far.

Adam Lisagor took this dronie of him and fellow drone enthusiast Alex Cornell standing on the roof of a building in LA:

There’s a reason that you’re going to see a lot of these from drone flyers like me, and it’s this: once you get past the novelty of taking a camera high up in the air, getting a bird’s eye view of stuff is actually a little boring.

What birds see is actually a little boring. Humans are interesting. Getting close to stuff is interesting. I bet if we could strap tiny cameras to bird heads, most of what we’d want to look at would happen when they fly close to people. If we could, we’d put cameras on bird heads to take pictures of ourselves.

The company that Amit runs, Photojojo, is going to start doing rentals soon, including kits for drone photography. And they’re gonna do flying lessons as well. For now, there’s a tutorial on the page about how to make “the perfect dronie”. (thx to everyone who sent in videos)

Alex Cornell has constructed a handy infographic to help you decide where to sit at a restaurant or dinner party table.

7 Person Rectangle: It’s very easy to get screwed in this scenario. While it may appear like you can sit anywhere except the ends, this is not so. You are at risk of sitting next to the lonely end-seat, which requires you to speak soley to that person for the duration of the meal.